Steve Jobs Named the “Greatest Entrepreneur Of Our Time” By Fortune

Agree or not, the late co-founder of Apple, Pixar and neXT, Steve Jobs has been named the “Greatest Entrepreneur of Our Time” by Fortune in their list of Top 12 Entrepreneurs belonging to recent times.

Over the years many have been intrigued by his unique ideas while many of them tried to find out what made him so special and brilliant, I guess it was just his out of the box thinking combined with revolting concepts that led him to become the king of entrepreneurial world.

Though he could be abusive and mean-spirited to people who threw themselves into their work on his behalf, Steve Jobs has been our generation’s quintessential entrepreneur. Visionary. Inspiring. Brilliant. Mercurial.

The magazine then went on to shower some light onto Steve’s disbelief in marketing and product research by quoting an incident where he was asked about the research done at Apple which helps them develop such successful products and he replied by saying,

None. It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want. It’s hard for [consumers] to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it.

On the day he launched the Macintosh, a reporter made the mistake of asking him if Apple had carried out any studies to find out if there was any market for the computer, Job’s instantly retorted in an offended tone,

Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?

There are some other great entrepreneurs on the list too, with Bill Gates taking the second position followed by Fred Smith of Fed Ex. Lower on the list in order off ranking are:

Jeff Bezos– Amazon

Larry Page & Sergey Brin – Google

Howard Schultz – Starbucks

Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook

John Mackey – Whole Foods

Herb Kelleher – Southwest Airlines

Narayana Murthy – Infosys

Sam Walton — WalMart

Muhammad Yunus — Grameen Bank

There is no denying that Jobs successfully revolutionized the technology industry and re-shaped traditional marketing and product research methods — he totally deserves to be at the number 1 spot.